lofty-cli supports four output formats so you can pipe results into any downstream tool. The default is human-readable text; everything else is selected with --format (or the --json shortcut).
text (default)
Designed for terminals. Tables are aligned and colorized; long fields are truncated.
Use --no-color to drop ANSI sequences and --no-header to omit the column row — useful when piping to awk or cut:
json
Stable, machine-readable, and the only format that preserves nested fields and full precision for 64-bit IDs.
Combine with jq for ad-hoc filtering:
csv
Round-trips cleanly into spreadsheets and csvkit / pandas.
Add --no-header to drop the header row when appending to an existing file.
yaml
Useful for human review of nested API responses.
Choosing fields
Most list and get commands accept --return-fields to reduce payload size and speed up downstream parsing:
The server applies the projection — the wire response itself is smaller, not just the rendered output.
Exit codes
Scripts should always check the exit code rather than inspect stderr text.